Blinding of Isaac Woodard

Front: Sgt. Isaac Woodard, a black soldier, was removed from a bus in Batesburg and arrested on Feb. 12, 1946, after a dispute with the bus driver. Woodard was beaten and blinded by a town police officer and the next day convicted in town court for “drunk and disorderly.” The incident led Harry Truman to form a Council on Civil Rights and issue Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the U.S. Armed Forces in 1948. Reverse: The police officer was charged with violating Woodard’s civil rights but was acquitted by an all-white jury. The result troubled the presiding judge, J. Waties Waring, who would go on to issue landmark civil rights rulings, including a dissent in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), which became a model for Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In 2018 a judge, on the town’s motion, expunged Woodard’s conviction.